Victorian Review

INTRODUCTION

An elderly woman is seated on a wooden chair in a domestic room, a sailboat and coastline visible through the window. Her gaze is directed down and to the side of the image, beyond the frame. She wears a dark blue kerchief, a buttoned dark waistcoat, and a pale shawl draped over her shoulders, with a blue-and-rose-patterned border and a long white fringe. In the second painting, the same woman stares directly at us, the viewers. She wears the same waistcoat but a different kerchief and shawl. The kerchief is red with a white border that is decorated with red flowers—roses or carnations. Despite the artist’s loose, almost impressionistic application of the paint, a complex all-over pattern is evident in the shawl, whose ruddy hues are interrupted by a solid light emerald-green that might be the shawl’s centre.

Both paintings were completed by the same artist and feature the same sitter, yet they reside in collections on almost opposite ends of Britain. The first, Portrait of a Devonian (ca. 1908), is held by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Devon; the second, The Paisley Shawl (ca. 1910), is part of the Paisley Art Institute collection, which is held by Paisley Museum and Art Galleries in Paisley, Renfrewshire. The artist—Francis Henry Newbery (1855–1946), director of the Glasgow School of Art from 1885 to 1918—had [End Page 49] ties to both Devon and Paisley. Newbery clearly associated both paintings with a particular locality since he named them accordingly and donated them to area museums.

In both images, the sitter’s Kashmiri-style shawl is prominent. This is interesting because the shawl as a fashion item had declined in popularity decades earlier, in the 1870s. In this article, I will study the meaning of Edwardian paintings that feature the shawl by examining these two works by Glasgow-based artist Newbery. Through analysis of these images, I will address the shawl’s “afterlife,” or second life, as nostalgic garment. These paintings and the shawls within them would have held such meaning for their sitter, artist, region, and nation. I will note nostalgia’s varied expression in each context.

The purpose of this enquiry—to consider the materiality and meanings of shawls depicted in paintings—aligns with the objectives of material culture studies, which art historian Jules David Prown has defined as “the object-based aspect of the study of culture” (5). Prown’s suggested method for studying material culture is the close examination of an object to discover its “internal evidence.” This includes, first, description, comprising evaluation of an object’s structural and formal properties and, if decorated, its “content” or subject matter; second, deduction, considering how a viewer interacts or empathizes with the object by factoring in one’s own sensory and intellectual engagements and emotional response; and third, speculation, involving the development of theories and hypotheses based on the results of the study so far, as well as the establishment of a program of further research that employs other disciplinary methodologies and techniques (7–10). This procedure is followed by consultation of outside sources (or “external evidence”) to check information uncovered from the close reading (7–12).

Shawls represented in the selected paintings will be examined for their structural properties such as fibres and manufacturing techniques, decorative content such as patterns, and formal qualities such as colour and texture. Supported by external historical evidence regarding the shawl’s domestic manufacture and consumption, this study will interpret the shawl’s role in signifying social status for Victorians and will suggest the possible provenance of the shawls depicted. I argue that analyzing Victorian-born painters’ choice to depict Kashmiri and imitation-Kashmiri shawls, and how they portrayed them, reveals valuable information about how these objects were consumed and worn and about their power as symbols of wealth, femininity, and empire. By noting potential locations of the depicted shawls’ manufacture, I will highlight their economic histories. As well, I will consider what the identity of the paintings’ sitter and the biography of the artist can tell us about the shawls’ meanings.

THE SHAWLS AND THEIR REPRESENTATIONS

Woven wool shawls from the Kashmir region of the Indian subcontinent became popular in Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century [End Page 50] and throughout the nineteenth century. From the 1770s onward, European manufacturers produced shawls that imitated Kashmiri examples but sold at competitively lower prices. As a result of their fashionability, Kashmiri shawls and their imitations made frequent appearances within European paintings. Jennifer van Schoor’s recent PhD thesis provides a survey and social analysis of the shawl in British art between 1760 and 1870. Van Schoor does not address Newbery because his activity is beyond the temporal bounds of her study.

Nineteenth-century paintings that feature the shawl tend to be either moral images or portraits of upper-class women. William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853–54) and The Children’s Holiday (1864–65) are respective examples of each (Quaile, Wrapped). In these images, objects’ colours are often morally coded: the bright red of the shawl in The Awakening Conscience, for example, likely signifies superficiality and lust, while the white of the shawl in The Children’s Holiday is associated with purity, marriage, and motherhood (Quaile, Wrapped). These readings support the depiction of the two women in these paintings as the archetypical “harlot” and “virtuous wife,” respectively (Arscott 168–69).

Unlike in the Victorian moral image and portrait of a wealthy woman by Hunt, in these paintings by Newbery, there is no blatant moral message. Rather, Newbery’s portraits depict a provincial Briton, her clothing a testament to the life events and subjective social values that it symbolized for her. In this way, these portraits appear far more intimate. The framing of each painting contributes to this reading: in both, there is little background detail, and the sitter (the lone person in the image) fills the foreground. A woman and her clothing are almost the sole subjects.

As mentioned, The Paisley Shawl depicts the elderly woman wearing a red kerchief around her head and a thick red shawl draped over her shoulders.¹ The shawl has a swirling, all-over pattern that suggests that it was made on a Jacquard loom, which was introduced on a wide scale to British shawl weaving during the 1840s. On a Jacquard loom, each warp thread could be raised individually if required, which eased the creation of curves in the design (Lochrie 105). The painting was presented to the Paisley Art Institute in 1915 (Rawson, Francis 272). In a 1916 letter to F. Harcourt Kitchin, editor of the Glasgow Herald, Newbery explained that the sitter is “Mrs. Cleeve” of the neighbourhood of Bideford, Devon. Mrs. Cleeve also sat for Newbery’s painting Portrait of a Devonian (fig. 1), which was completed as early as 1908 (Rawson, Francis 272).

As he did with The Paisley Shawl, Newbery donated Portrait of a Devonian to the region of its title—in this case, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum at Exeter, in 1916 (Rawson, Francis 272). In Portrait of a Devonian, Mrs. Cleeve again wears a kerchief around her head (this time, dark blue) and a shawl draped over her shoulders; this time, the shawl has a plain white background with rose-coloured floral motifs at the ends and a fringe of long tassels.² It is unclear [End Page 51] whether the clothes in The Paisley Shawl belonged to the sitter or to the artist, although in his letter to Kitchin, Newbery explained that the clothing that “Mrs. Cleeve” wore for Portrait of a Devonian was her usual dress. This is signifi-cant because, as mentioned, both portraits’ completion occurred forty years past the period of the shawl fashion, which declined in the 1870s.

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Fig 1.

Francis Henry Newbery, Portrait of a Devonian, ca. 1908. Oil on canvas, 114.4 × 91.5 cm. Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery: 35/1917. Courtesy of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery.

During the shawl’s time in vogue, some claimed that it would never go out of style. In 1866, the London fashion periodical Bow Bells linked shawls to fashions of the Classical Mediterranean, stating that “[o]f the wardrobes of the ancients . . . the shawl is the only article which has not been superseded” (“The Shawl”). The Kashmiri shawl was also regarded as unchanging due to a Eurocentric idea that India itself remained in antiquity. As historian Michelle Maskiell remarks, this concept of India was promoted by nineteenth-century philological scholarship as well as “many popular writings” (41). Among the latter is an iconic essay authored by Harriet Martineau that appeared in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words in [End Page 52] August 1852. Martineau explicitly links the Kashmiri shawl industry to the image of Asia itself as static, opining that “[i]f any article of dress could be immutable, it would be the shawl; designed for eternity in the unchanging East; copied from patterns which are the heirloom of a caste, and woven by fatalists, to be worn by adorers of the ancient garment, who resent the idea of the smallest change” (553).

Despite this sentiment, the shawl did fall from European fashion. It is generally agreed that there are two main reasons that the European shawl fashion, which had endured for almost a century, declined during the 1870s. First, mass production made the imitation-Kashmiri shawl more affordable and available to wider sections of society and therefore reduced the social prestige of Kashmiri and imitation-Kashmiri shawls alike (Hiner 91; Lévi-Strauss 52). As prices for European shawls dropped during the 1860s, Kashmiri production necessarily increased, and the market was flooded with coarser and heavier weaves. This too reduced demand for these products as clothing (Lévi-Strauss 52). Second, in the 1870s, European silhouette-altering fashions changed. The wide, circular crinoline was replaced by the narrower bustle, which allowed for greater movement and could be worn with a fitted jacket as an outer layer instead. The bustle expanded the drapery at the back of a woman’s dress and not at the front or sides, and thus differed from the circular shape of the crinoline (Clark 112). John Irwin reflects that the shawl went “[f ]rom being the pride of every girl at her marriage and coming-ofage” to being “relegated to the grandmother’s wardrobe” (18).

But, as Maskiell explains, the shawl did not disappear from the market. Fostered by the European belief that India remained in antiquity and that European stylistic influence threatened Indian craft industries, in the 1880s, Kashmiri shawls were promoted as antiques for domestic furnishing (41, 54). Artistic movements of the 1880s such as Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism may also have influenced the Kashmiri shawl’s new life as an antique through their valuing of handmade products over machine-made goods (Maskiell 42). The shawl’s value as an antique at this time is demonstrated by the fact that in 1887, shawls from Kashmir were sold by Liberty London at prices ranging from £30 to £500 (Adburgham 58). Susan Hiner writes that by the first decades of the twentieth century, shawls were “relegated to indoor status” and were used almost exclusively to furnish homes (104). A shawl might be used as a wall hanging or draped over a piano (Lévi-Strauss 52). But another reason that the shawl was not “relegated to the grandmother’s wardrobe,” as Irwin claimed, is that some women—grandmothers included—did not adopt the latest fashion and continued to wear shawls (Maskiell 49). As recorded by Newbery, Mrs. Cleeve was among them.

Familiarity and comfort are likely reasons that Mrs. Cleeve valued this shawl. Kashmiri shawls’ popularity and prevalence over the course of the nineteenth century meant that they came to be naturalized Western dress (Maskiell 29). In the Victorian era, imitation-Kashmiri shawls produced in [End Page 53] Paisley and Norwich were portrayed as modern and patriotic—especially for middle-class Britons, who could not afford “authentic” Kashmiri shawls (Zutshi 434–35). In France, this was also the case for French-made shawls (Lévi-Strauss 28).

Evidence of the shawl’s European domestication can be read in the ceremonial circumstances in which it was given and worn. Throughout the nineteenth century, Kashmiri shawls were presented as gifts by upper-middle-class men working in colonial India to their mothers, sisters, and wives (Daly 235, 249; Reilly 32). Both the Queen and the Duchess of Kent encouraged the association of Kashmiri and imitation-Kashmiri shawls with christenings when they wore “rich shawl[s] of Paisley manufacture” at the Prince of Wales’s christening, in 1842 (“Christening”). By the 1860s in France and Britain, shawls were common gifts for weddings and baptisms—rituals that, as Penelope Alfrey notes, “signif[ied] the bonds of affection that linked bride to groom or parent to child” (28–29, 32). In Scotland, a shawl that a woman wore to her first church service after her marriage or the birth of her child was referred to as a “kirking shawl” after the Scots word “kirk,” meaning “church” (Reilly 39). These shawls were typically long shawls (known in Scotland as “plaids”) with white centres (Reilly 39). Long shawls of the same style as the one in Portrait of a Devonian—with its white centre and decorative border featuring boteh motifs—were worn to church on these occasions during the 1850s and 1860s (Reilly 38). Alfrey writes that such shawls were often kept in “purpose-made chests” that were scented with sandalwood or cedarwood to deter moths (29). That shawls were stored with such care underscores their value.

A shawl received as a gift and worn to important celebrations was a reminder of one’s own history and that of one’s family. Can census returns tell us about Mrs. Cleeve’s life? A woman of the appropriate surname and age appears in census returns for the Bideford area at the time that Newbery painted Portrait of a Devonian and The Paisley Shawl: widow Grace Cleave (née Hicks, 1824–1917) (it may be, then, that Newbery misspelled her name in his letter to Kitchin). Grace Hicks married farmer Charles Cleave in 1848 (“Grace Hicks”). As the owner of a 239-acre farm that employed several men, Charles surely had the means to purchase a nice shawl for his wife (Census Returns 1851, 1861, 1871). Charles died in 1894 (“Charles Colwell Cleave”), after which time, Grace lived with her daughter Elizabeth (Census Returns 1901, 1911).

The date of Charles and Grace’s marriage corresponds with the style of the white shawl in Portrait of a Devonian. The long fringe is similar to that of a block-printed silk gauze shawl of mid-century. An example is a shawl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was block-printed on silk gauze in Britain in ca. 1845–50 (fig. 2). However, unlike this shawl, Mrs. Cleeve’s shawl had a fringe that had become knotted together—a sign that it was well loved and worn often. [End Page 54]

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Fig 2.

Shawl, 1845–1850. British. Silk. Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1981.280.3. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This type of shawl was made not just in Paisley, but all over Britain. Other examples are a shawl of ca. 1850 in the Victoria and Albert Museum made by Swaisland Printworks in Crayford (Long shawl) and several printed shawls from the 1840s and 1850s that were made in Norwich (Clabburn 118–25). Thus, the white shawl in Portrait of a Devonian was not necessarily made in Paisley—it could have been produced in England. If Grace Cleave is the painting’s sitter, she might have worn the same shawl after her wedding or the birth of her first child, William, in early 1849 (“William Thomas Cleave”).

As in the shawl in Portrait of a Devonian, it is difficult make out the surface details of the shawl in The Paisley Shawl, since Francis Newbery’s style was quite impressionistic. However, its colours (mainly red, with what appears to be a green centre) and configuration (as an all-over-patterned long shawl) declare that it was most likely made in the 1860s. All-over-patterned long shawls were often thick and were worn when warmth was needed, such as during the winter (Reilly 39). An example of a Paisley-made all-over-patterned long shawl from the 1860s can be found within the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 3). This shawl has a swirling pattern and similar shades of red to the one in The Paisley Shawl, although its centre is crimson.

Perhaps, like the shawl in Portrait of a Devonian, the shawl in The Paisley Shawl was owned by Mrs. Cleeve (it could have been a gift from her husband), or perhaps it was the artist’s. Francis Newbery frequently dressed his models in clothes that belonged to either him or his wife, the artist, embroiderer, and teacher Jessie Wylie Newbery (née Rowat, 1864–1948). For example, [End Page 55]

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Fig 3.

Shawl, 1865–1875. Scottish. Wool and silk, 162.6 × 332.7 cm. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art: 2009.300.3010. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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a model wears a dress that Jessie Newbery designed and made in The Lady of the Carnation (ca. 1919) and again in Daydreams (ca. 1920) (Rawson, Francis 265–66). Furthermore, throughout her life, Jessie collected textiles when she travelled, and it is therefore likely that she had a collection of shawls (Tanner; Rawson, Interview).

There is little information about where Newbery completed Portrait of a Devonian and The Paisley Shawl. He was personally connected to both Devon and Paisley, having been born in Membury, Devon, and worked as director of the Glasgow School of Art between 1885 and 1918 (Rawson, “Newbery”). Paisley’s proximity to Glasgow makes it the plausible setting of The Paisley Shawl, had Mrs. Cleeve travelled there. However, Newbery had little time to paint during the school year and probably completed much of his own work during summer holidays when he travelled with Jessie (Rawson, Francis 256). Indeed, much of the Newberys’ time was spent in England: from 1900, they rented a semi-detached house in Walberswick, Suffolk, where they spent the latter part of their annual summer holidays (Rawson, Francis 260). It is likely that Francis Newbery became acquainted with Mrs. Cleeve and completed both paintings in his home county of Devon—particularly since a coastline is visible through the window within Portrait of a Devonian. Given that The Paisley Shawl features the same model, it was probably painted in Devon but later donated to the Paisley Art Institute. The painting’s donation to Paisley confirms that Newbery associated the shawl in the painting with the Paisley industry, and the evidence gained through the material analysis of this shawl likewise verifies Newbery’s familiarity with the subject and his apt choice of title.

Besides living near Paisley, Newbery would have been familiar with Paisley’s shawl industry through his role as director of the Glasgow School of Art and as a prior exhibitor at the Paisley Art Institute (Newbery exhibited with the Paisley Art Institute as early as 1890) (Rawson, Francis 256). Newbery also had a personal connection to the Paisley shawl industry through his wife, Jessie. Born in Paisley, Jessie was the daughter of William Rowat, who worked as a shawl manufacturer until the 1880s, when he invested in his brother’s tea-importing business (Helland, Professional 92). Francis would have had easy access to Paisley shawls through Jessie because of her family’s involvement in the Paisley shawl industry (Breingan and Coughlan, Interview). As mentioned, Jessie too worked in textiles: trained at the Glasgow School of Art, in 1894, she founded and became head of the school’s embroidery department (Tanner). Coincidentally, she also designed the cover of the book The Paisley Thread Industry (1907) by Paisley yarn merchant and author Matthew Blair (1837–1908) (Blair, Thread 8).

Blair believed that although Paisley had produced numerous different fine textile products, the shawl was the most important (Blair, Shawl 23). As in his earlier book The Paisley Shawl (1904), in The Paisley Thread Industry, Blair reflected nostalgically on “the prosperous days of the shawl trade” (109), explaining that “[t]he leading industries of the town, although excellent in their own [End Page 57] way, do not now require the same artistic services” (151). Blair’s death in 1908, soon after his books on Paisley were published (“A Weaving”), likely added to the general sentiment that the Paisley shawl era was over. As one who was acquainted with Blair’s work, Francis Newbery would conceivably have been emotionally affected by this. The timing of Portrait of a Devonian and The Paisley Shawl’s completion aligns with Blair’s publications and death.

In further considering the shawl’s meaning for Newbery as the artist, his politics and opinions about art are also significant. As head of the Glasgow School of Art, Newbery sought to merge fine art with technical arts and design. He was a socialist supporter and followed the views of William Morris and Walter Crane, with whom he was friends (Rawson, Francis 121, 125). As a painter, Newbery positioned himself as a champion of the every-man: his works typically feature working-class people and, following his retirement from the Glasgow School of Art in 1918, he accepted numerous commissions to create public artworks including inn signs and local war memorials (Rawson, Francis 274, 281, 289). Newbery was therefore invested in celebrating localities through his painting (Rawson, Interview).

I propose that the shawls in Portrait of a Devonian and The Paisley Shawl are nostalgic in their reminiscence of the bygone shawl fashion (which Newbery would have remembered from his childhood) and the Paisley shawl industry. Although the circumstances of the shawl’s manufacture are not visible, Newbery was well aware that since the 1840s, the Paisley shawl industry had largely shifted from a cottage industry to a factory-based system of production (Lochrie 104–6). Unlike his friend William Morris, Newbery viewed commercialism as beneficial to art and design. Rawson explains that Newbery also spoke in support of commercialism since it “left the artist free to choose his own subject matter and way of approaching it.” Indeed, he perceived that “[t]he only restriction it placed on [the artist] . . . was the need to ensure that the potential purchaser could understand his work and would deem it a good investment.” Rawson observes that Newbery’s support of commercialism was “perhaps partly in deference to his [largely industrial] Glasgow audience, and possibly by way of a subtle plea for more patronage for the city’s artistic community” (Rawson, Francis 122). In his capacity as an art educationist, Newbery believed in the importance of public engagement. He thus pursued connections with local societies and penned articles in Glasgow newspapers to gain public support for the school of art and its graduates—especially from textile manufacturing firms (Rawson, Francis).

Newbery believed that the factory system was unavoidable, and that design improved when artists made alliances with manufacturers (Rawson, Francis 124). He would have regarded the artistry of the Paisley shawl as emblematic of the possibilities of this relationship—particularly within his local context of the west of Scotland (namely, Paisley and Glasgow). However, the Paisley shawl industry was not just a local industry but the result of colonial appropriation, and shawl patterns were often copied in [End Page 58] their entirety from Asian patterns (Quaile, “Imitation” 9). Along with the copying of Asian designs, improvements in weaving technology meant that by the second half of the nineteenth century, it was hard to tell Kashmiri shawls from their European imitations—so much so that as Renate Dohmen observes, it is difficult to ascertain the provenance of the shawl in another William Holman Hunt painting in which one appears: Portrait of Fanny Holman Hunt (1867–68) (102). Through this imperialist lens, the shawl therefore represented a triumphalist narrative of (British) technology at last rivalling the finest handmade products of other parts of the world. To put it another way, to those who believed in this narrative, the imitation-Kashmiri or paisley shawl signified the victory of British brains over Indian hands—an “imperial dialectic” that Julie Codell has noted in British discussions about Indian art and artisans at the time (161). Given the gendering of the colonial narrative, which associated European technological progress with manliness (Dohmen 18), seen from this imperialist perspective, the shawl carries very different connotations from the domestic femininity that Mrs. Cleeve likely associated with it.

CONCLUSION

In sum, nostalgia for the shawl and its meaning surfaced in painted representations during the Edwardian era. For the sitter Mrs. Cleeve, this would have meant reminders of a respectable feminine fashion from her youth, the life events that were marked by the shawl’s gifting and the occasions on which it was worn (and thus her personal and family histories), and—possibly—national pride. Within their regional, national, and colonial context, such representations would have symbolized pride for the region of the shawl’s manufacture as well as evidence of British imperial domination (economic, intellectual, and technological). For Newbery the artist, besides a family connection via his wife, the shawls’ representations symbolized a craft object that had been successfully adapted to industrial production. Ever the art educationist, Newbery would have viewed the British shawl as an ideal example of art’s alliance with manufacturing.

As Rawson acknowledges, prior to its donation to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Devon, in 1916, Portrait of a Devonian was exhibited in several locations under the title Memories (Rawson, Francis 272). This, and the context of Newbery’s other contemporary paintings, confirms that the portraits of Mrs. Cleeve are, for the artist, also about nostalgia. The shawls in Portrait of a Devonian and The Paisley Shawl are reminiscent of an admired fashion and its benefit to local industry. This sentiment was expressed in the Paisley histories of Matthew Blair, with which Newbery was acquainted. Wearing her old-fashioned clothing and a pensive expression, the elderly woman in these two paintings by Newbery appears engaged in retrospection and is herself a reminder of a bygone age of fashion and society. Like Blair’s two books, Newbery’s two portraits of Mrs. Cleeve are a tribute to this age. [End Page 59]